Control systems and control theory are well-developed fields of research and development that have had a profound impact on the design and development of a large number of systems and technologies, from airplanes, spacecraft, and other vehicle and transportation systems to computer systems, industrial manufacturing and operations facilities, machine tools, process machinery, and consumer devices. Control theory encompasses a large body of practical, system-control-design principles, but is also an important branch of theoretical and applied mathematics. Various different types of controllers are commonly employed in many different application domains, from simple closed-loop feedback controllers to complex, adaptive, state-space and differential-equations-based processor-controlled control systems.
One class of intelligent controllers includes intelligent controllers that control systems that affect one or more environmental parameters within an environment. Often, an intelligent controller is tasked with controlling the systems under various constraints in order to meet two or more control goals, requiring careful balancing and tradeoffs in the degrees to which potentially conflicting goals are obtained. Designers, manufactures, and users of intelligent controllers continue to seek control methods and systems that effectively control systems when two or more control goals may conflict.